I wasted my time uploading to Pixabay... what next?

Turns out Pixabay has categories "Published" and "Featured". If it's "Published" it is not indexed. Which means you wasted your time on keywords and description - no-one is going to find your photos if it is not indexed. So I'm now searching for a site where they will be easy to upload, discoverable and easy to download. I've done searches for this and the Google choices are Unsplash, Pexel, LifeOfPix and Wikipedia Commons and a bunch of others. Seems every time I search there are new options. I'm looking for human recommendations for sites that work for folks. Where the upload process actually reads your IPTC/EXIF data and you don't have to do a lot of manual re-editing of metadata. Where the images get indexed and are visible to general internet searches. I've about 1000 high quality images of cultural events I want public, searchable, discoverable and downloadable. Thanks!